Night At The Nobel Museum

Every year since 1901 the Nobel Prize has been awarded for achievements in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and for peace.

I missed listing the prize for Economics in that list. The prize for Economics is strictly speaking a memorial award that was started in 1968.

The Economics Nobel winners for this year were announced today a few hours back. And Ezra Klein made the major goof up (and soon corrected it) on the Washington Post site claiming "Larry Diamond wins the Nobel Prize, continues being blocked by the Senate." The Nobel winners name is Peter not Larry points out Stephen Levitt of Freakonomics fame.

According to Alfred Nobel's will, the Nobel prizes were to be awarded to "those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind." The Peace Prize specifically was to be awarded to persons who had been working for "fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

The Peace Prize has always been the most controversial. This year's decision is no exception. Liu Xiaobo, the jailed Chinese dissident who won the Nobel Peace Prize, was informed of his award in prison and has dedicated it to those killed when the Chinese government crushed pro-democracy protests around Tiananmen Square in 1989, says the Wall Street Journal.

Some facts about the Nobel Prize

41 Nobel Prizes and Prizes in Economic Sciences have been awarded to women and 776 to men between 1901 and 2010. In 1915, Lawrence Bragg, became the youngest winner ever when he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with his father. Now you why they say he had Bragging Rights :).

Marie Curie got the Nobel twice. She shared the Nobel for Physics with Hubby Pierre in 1903. In 1935, their daughter Irene also won the Nobel in Chemistry with hubby Frédéric Joliot. See, being a role model matters.

NObel begins with a NO

If you got the Nobel Prize (for any reason), would you decline it? Le Duc Tho, awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize jointly with US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, was the second person to decline the prize.

The first one was  Jean-Paul Sartre, who was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature. He declined the prize because he had consistently declined all official honours. Sartre had been informed unofficially by someone that he was going to be awarded the Nobel that year. An alarmed Sartre wrote to the committee and told them he did not want to be considered and that he would anyway decline it if he was given it anyway. The Committee responded by saying that the prize would be give if Sartre's work was considered worthy and not whether he wanted it or not was really irrelevant. While Sartre declined the prize, after a few years he wrote to the Committee again and asked if he could have just the money minus the medal and diploma. The Committee denied this request because, the money has to be collected within 12 months of the announcement - the diploma and medal can be collected any time. The Nobel cheque of $1.5 million also lapses like your airlines miles.

Movies are made about Nobel Prize winners like John Nash (1994) who was the inspiration behind the film A Beautiful Mind. Here is a touching moment with the real John Nash.

When my trip to Stockholm got planned I made only one promise to myself, that I would go and see the Nobel Museum. That big day was on 9th October 2010. What made it even more exciting is that the Nobel Museum is in the same building where the 74 year old Peruvian poet Mario Vargas Llosa was chosen  on 7th Oct 2010 to get this year's  Nobel Prize for Literature. I had written about the poetry of Pablo Neruda some weeks back. Read the article here.

Nobel trivia

By the way, Nobel for literature has been shared only 4 times. 26 winners in literature wrote in English. French and German language works have won the Nobel 13 times. Rudyard Kipling is the youngest to win the Nobel for Lit at 42. Rabindranath Tagore (Nobel Prize in Literature 1913) wrote in Bengali and English, Samuel Beckett (Nobel Prize in Literature 1969) wrote in French and English and Joseph Brodsky (Nobel Prize in Literature 1987) wrote poetry in Russian and prose in English. These three Nobel Laureates are categorised under Bengali, French and Russian respectively.

Nobel Controversies

The Nobel has had its own share of controversies. The Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was nominated for 12 years for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In 1929, the Nobel Committee for Medicine engaged an expert who came to the conclusion that a further investigation in Freud was not necessary, since Freud's work was of no proven scientific value. Freud was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936 but never won.

Albert Einstein's 1921 Nobel Prize award mainly recognized his 1905 discovery of the mechanism of the photoelectric effect and "for his services to Theoretical Physics," rather than his often-counter-intuitive concepts and advanced constructs of relativity theory.

Mahatma Gandhi never won the Nobel for Peace and in giving the Nobel to the 14th Dalai Lama in 1989, the committee hoped that their lapse in missing Gandhi was partly compensated. Dmitri Mendeleyev, who originated the periodic table of the elements, never received a Nobel Prize.

There is also the story one had heard that Alfred Nobel never allocated funds for a prize in Mathematics because his wife had an affair with a mathematician. Not true at all. Alfred Nobel died a bachelor!

In the evening after the museum is closed to the public, the place turns into a small makeshift restaurant. You can have dinner as you contemplate the profound influence of these winners on the world. Desert consists of some sinful ice cream that has a chocolate replica of the Nobel Prize medal wrapped up in a golden foil. The only difference is that this medal has 200 gms of chocolate and not gold.

The Museum has two screening halls. One which screens films that show interviews with many of the winners. Then there is another screening room where they screen films which show the environment in which the winners operated. I saw two films there. One was about Cambridge and what was it about the place that has a disproportionate influence on the Nobel Winners.

I noticed that the screening room had a bust of Rabindranath Tagore in the room - the only person whose statue was there in the museum.  The second film that was screened was about Shantiniketan and how the people there saw Gurudev and his work.

For those who wish to see what it feels like when the results are announced, here is how the 2010 Nobel for literature was announced.

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Read more about the poems of Pablo Neruda who won the Nobel for Lit in 1971.

Visit the Official Nobel Prize site here
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